Don't give him sight of your gold, my friends.

Category Archives: Poetry

Today I finished reading the selected poems of Vladislav Khodasevich, whose work I hardly knew, in these wonderful translations by Peter Daniels. Not only are the poems themselves a revelation (you can see why Nabokov and Brodsky rated him so highly), but this edition is itself exemplary. Daniels’ notes are especially impressive, modestly explaining the judicious and complicated decisions he made while rendering the verse into English. More broadly, we’re reminded of how radically Modernism was able to transform the arts while remaining deeply rooted in tradition (in this case most solidly embodied in Pushkin).http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/

What are you working on now?
I’m writing the odd new poem as usual, and also getting back to some translating from Russian, but mainly I’m trying to sort out a backlog of poems that have got stuck in the “Working on” folder and forgotten about. Brushing up the ones that have anything in them, and getting together some possible pamphlets. Maybe also thinking about another book, though I wouldn’t want to rush that.

Why is your work different from other work in the same genre?
It’s mine, I suppose, which is a rather feeble answer. You could say I’m a fairly plain mainstream poet, and I like poems to sound good and come over well when spoken, but I don’t think I’m very classifiable. I try to be quite various in what I do, which can be a problem for gathering things together. Quite a lot of my subject matter is explicitly gay (more in the last few years than it was for a while) which can either embarrass people or get me put into a neat ghetto. That doesn’t necessarily go so well with translating from Russian, for instance.

Why do you write like you do?
I’m an editor, so I like to be clear, or if I’m not there has to be a reason for it. I like craft without making a fetish of it. I play with words but I don’t get carried away. With the translations I’ve especially enjoyed finding a music in English to match the Russian, and that mostly has meant using strict metre and rhyme which I do in my own poems too but not so much. Rhythm got into me early as a poetry reader and it’s always there, but I don’t want to be relentless with it either, except in the occasional poem where that’s the intended effect.

Probably a lot of what I write is observation rather than participation, though I’m usually in the picture somewhere.

How does your writing process work?
Trying to surprise myself. I start writing with a choice of five out of a box of words, mixed vocabulary – several magnetic sets combined with words from things like paint charts – plus a photo I’ve taken (so it’s like a notebook entry on an experience, not just a picture), and a phrase out of my pocket notebook. A lot of the time this doesn’t turn into a poem, but often enough. I type them up and often forget them, which is why I’ve got this backlog. It’s the revising which happens much later that turns all this into a poem if it’s going to happen. The revising can go on for years. I worry sometimes that the randomness is getting a bit samey but I haven’t found a better trigger, other than going to a group where we’re set homework, which I’ve also been doing. Those poems usually get settled more quickly because I know more clearly what I’m trying to say in them.

I’m now passing the baton of these questions to two bloggers for next week:

I’m very pleased by the review by G.S. Smith (Emeritus Professor of Russian at Oxford). I even do quite well out of the penultimate paragraph, where the ifs and buts always come in reviews:
“In his own introduction, and particularly in his notes, Daniels is disarmingly open and honest about his method, and about the compromises with semantic equivalence it entails. In both these accounts, though, he ignores the massive legacy of linguistics- and statistics-based Russian expertise concerning European verse form. Fortunately, his ear is consistently better than his theoretical grasp.”

Other quotable moments to preen with:

“Peter Daniels and Angel Books have given us an English Khodasevich worthy of his stature.”

The translations “capture the intelligence, the unerring good taste, and the controlled passion of the originals. They are also commendably close to the primary meaning of the Russian, with its laconically observed social reality tending towards the sordid, but with constant saving glimpses of an angelic realm.”

“There are no disasters, and several ringing triumphs.”

“Knowledge of Khodasevich was always restricted to the literary elite, but he was never completely forgotten, and in post-Soviet times his poetry has risen in esteem. Thanks to Peter Daniels, his reputation may now take off among English-speaking readers.”

Khodasevich is buried in Paris – not with Oscar Wilde and other illustrious figures in the romantic hillside cemetery of Père Lachaise, but in the pleasant but undramatic Boulogne-Billancourt nouveau cimetière on the other side of the city, a flat site beside the Seine but with no view of it. ‘Billankursk’ was one of the areas inhabited by the Russian émigrés, where many worked in the nearby Renault factory: refugees from the Bolsheviks were trusted to be non-unionised workers. Nina Berberova wrote a cycle of stories Biankurskie prazdniki (Billancourt Holidays) when they lived at 10 bis rue des Quatre Cheminées. A few blocks south of there, another street where she and Khodasevich lived was renamed in 2005 ‘rue Nina Berberova’. http://solere.blogs.com/boulogne/2005/10/rue_nina_berber.html

I admit I have not yet made pilgrimages to the places where they actually lived, but I have visited the cemetery. The first time I went, I found information on the burial place on the internet, as you do, and then realised when we were in Paris and making the visit that I hadn’t brought any of that with me. Never mind, although the lodge at the gate was unstaffed there was a computer screen on which to search for the name of the deceased. I tried every transliterated version of his name I could think of, but nothing came up, so we wandered around inspecting graves on the offchance. In fact when I got home I found that he was in the 2ème division, in front of which I had by chance been photographed.

Back in Paris two years later, I knew only too well that he was in the 2ème, and took with me the picture of his grave from the internet. I tried looking for a precise location on the computer screen but failed again, even with the spelling from the website http://www.landrucimetieres.fr/spip/spip.php?article1682

At any rate, there he was, with some evidence of grave-tending though only one of several plant pots had anything living in it (a sedum, tough little things as they are). Someone had also left a small porcelain bouquet sitting on the granite slab – not there in the photo on the website, so evidently quite recent. I hadn’t thought of the transliteration Hodassevitch, as carved on the slab: it doesn’t look to me as if the mason was very confident with the cyrillic though that’s perfectly adequate.

I showed the poet his new book – or at least an image of the cover, as it was still at the printers – and I also felt I needed to read the translation of his poem ‘Gold’. There’s some danger here of self-aggrandising, as the poem tells of how ‘after many many years of darkness / a stranger will come and dig my skeleton up’. I wasn’t going to do that, but in my three years of translating his poems I could hardly avoid finding myself in the role of the man digging up this poet’s buried reputation in the West (he was also ‘buried’ in the Soviet Union, though he did circulate in samizdat, and in present-day Russia his reputation is secure). When he wrote the poem in early 1917, he was translating Polish literature and coming into his prime as a poet, a vocation he took seriously in a very Russian way. His biographer David Bethea must have felt rather like me when he was writing in the early 1980s:

The poem’s title is taken from a passage of Krasinski’ s Irydion, which Khodasevich cites, in his Russian translation, as an epigraph. It refers to the traditional gold coin placed on the mouth of the deceased. What will always shine among the poet’s remains is this piece of gold, this “solntse maloe” (little sun). Then one day some stranger (a future poet) will stumble upon the gold coin and cherish it. Khodasevich’s point appears to be that a small part of him, a psychic core, will never die; it will survive in his verse and continue to be found by later explorers. As Krasinski’s gold was Khodasevich’s find, so Khodasevich’s gold will be a find for someone else. (Khodasevich: his life and art, p. 153).

Next time I’ll bring another sedum, and go to the streets where he and Nina lived. No sign of a rue Khodassevitch yet – but maybe I just haven’t looked up the right spelling.